Protest

I’ve seen a lot of maps over past few days, and I’ve seen enough cartoon characters. Like massively bile-inducing stereograms, the squinting at patches of colour — those heatmaps of hate — produsce nothing but despair.

I’ve taken to focusing now just on how those patches of yellow have changed over the last few decades. The red and the blue (discounting Scotland) are fairly constant, pulsing but constant. The Liberal yellow appears slowly and spreads a little from 87—2010, but essentially remains in the same places.

Now it’s gone.

So, I wonder if the age of the ‘third party’ protest vote is over, for at least a generation. Because it took time for the Liberal Party (in its various forms) to hit a 50 MP balance and they did well — but essentially they were an alternative. One that based its alternative on being ‘a little from column A, a little from column B’. And when they decided that ‘power’ was worth having they couldn’t stay an alternative. And so the support went: splintered in different directions, but it did go. And the bits that were previously blue went blue and the bits that were red, went red. We’re back to how it was.

So, that’s it for the Liberal Democrats, while they might have an activist base they don’t have a core vote: because as far as the public see it they don’t stand for anything, they just stand apart. Or did.

Now, some people might say Ukip fill that protest vote: but I don’t think it’s the same people that are protesting. That’s another battle. The Greens could fill that protest vote, but it will take a long time to build up anything more than a few percent. And the Greens are not seen as a safe ‘split the difference’ vote — so they are not the same people either.

I don’t know if Labour can get the floating centrist voters that this time felt that they may as well vote Tory, but I know they will lose an equal number to the left if they try to do it by moving to the right. They’ve got to do something different.

Tom might help. I know that a ‘grassroots surge’ won’t work with the party mechanism they way they are. A large number of activists work hard, but they can do little to affect the way that the party behaves at the top. We may need people that understand the power of the crowd, and the possibilities of connection. Podemos in Spain seem to have a new way of organising that helps people feel part of a movement, collaborative and distributed. That feels like a better thing than just chasing votes and being angry.

Author: Jon Bounds

14th Most Influential Person in the West Midlands 2008, subsequently not placed.
His new book about visiting every seaside pier in England and Wales — Pier Review — has been described as “On the Road meets On the Buses”, it's out now.
Jon wrote and directed the first ever piece of drama to be performed on Twitter and founded the famous blog Birmingham: It's Not Shit.
View all posts by Jon Bounds

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